Month: September 2002

Oh my God, it’s finally over.

Yes, the Move ™ is at long, long last complete. Except for all the boxes that still need unpacking…and the furniture that needs arranging…and the subscriptions that need changing…and the jobs that need finding. Other than that, it’s all over.

We’re now in the lovely town of Syracuse, NY. We’ve actually been here since last Friday, but I haven’t been able to go online because our phone lines were actually broken and required servicing, which didn’t get done until just this afternoon. Thus I was able to use time that I would probably have otherwise used for posting to Byzantium’s Shores to actually unpack. Some random thoughts on the move:

:: My God, I own a ton of books. I still have many of my college texts (mostly the ones from my philosophy classes, complete with marginalia scrawled ten years ago). I also have a lot of books that I simply no longer want, so I’m planning to make my first foray into selling things on Ebay sometime in the next month.

:: Moving in the space of a single week does not give one enough time to go through one’s belongings and weed them out. You end up moving everything, and only when you’re unpacking it all do you say, “Hmmm, I still own this? Well, to the dumpster with it!”

:: It’s fairly convenient that roughly every two years or so I start to thinking that we should really get a couch…and then we have to move, which firmly banishes the thought of couch-ownership for another two years. I’m back to my “happy with the papasan chair and the crappy recliner” state of mind.

:: One of the sadder duties in life is trying to explain to one’s three-year-old why she can’t go to the park down the street anymore…because it is now 130 miles down the street.

:: Design flaws are us: The second day after the move I got the TV and VCR hooked up, mainly so I could distract the three-year-old with her Disney movies while we unpacked. She was thrilled when I announced that I had all the wires hooked up, and all I had to do was turn everything on — whereupon I learn that the VCR, when unplugged long enough before being replugged, goes into its handy “setup” mode upon being turned on that first time. The bad part is that to work the setup mode, the remote control is required. And the remote control was still at the bottom of some box, somewhere, someplace. Not only is there no way to work the setup mode with the VCR’s front panel buttons, there is no way to cancel the setup mode — until the setup mode’s second screen, where you can cancel the thing by pressing “Clear” on the remote.

:: Design flaws, part two. Actually, I’m not sure if this is a design flaw, but our phone lines were out of order until today. Yesterday morning, the knob on our new apartment’s front door broke and was inoperable — with all of us inside. So we’re locked in, and we can’t call the maintenance people. We had to wait twenty minutes or so until someone actually wandered by outside, at which point we shouted for them to call the maintenance folks. Ugh. (The maintenance folks, though, arrived within five minutes of our flagging down the neighbor.)

:: Our property is shared by a golf course. So far I’ve counted four golfers who have managed to land their shots on our building’s front lawn, which is not remotely in the same direction as the hole toward which they are theoretically shooting. And I’m sorry, golfers, but I consider the golf cart to be one of the most ridiculous inventions of all time. I watch these guys shoot, return to the cart, put their club away, hop in and drive to the ball’s present location in roughly the same amount of time that I could have walked there in the first place. Unless you’re that pro golfer with the ailment that makes the cart necessary, you don’t need the cart.

:: Good stuff I’ve discovered about Syracuse: the Barnes&Noble here is larger than either of the B&N’s in Buffalo, which surprised me immensely. The main shopping mall, the Carousel Center, is one of the most beautiful malls I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been in a lot of malls). A project is afoot to expand the Carousel Center until it becomes the largest mall in North America, which wouldn’t bother me at all (although I wonder a bit why they’d want to build such a thing in a small town like Syracuse, which is roughly the same size as Cedar Rapids, Iowa). The Buffalo Bills are still on TV here, and to the best of my knowledge there is as yet no Krispy Kreme store in Syracuse. (Believe me, that’s a good thing. Of course, I’ll also consider it a good thing when they get one.)

And, for those dying to know what Syracuse looks like, here’s a photograph of what is apparently the tallest building in the city. The photo links to a site where various images of the city can be found.

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It’s amazing how the twists and turns of life are sometimes — well, most times, to be realistic — completely unexpected and, though welcome, also traumatic.

My wife’s company rewarded two years of her hard work two days ago with a promotion, effective one week from today. That’s the great part. The traumatic part comes into play thusly: the promotion entails moving the family, in the space of a single week, one hundred twenty miles down the road to Syracuse, New York.

Leaving Buffalo is sad enough; leaving Buffalo basically with no notice whatsoever is utterly shocking. And it’s more than a bit scary, as I really know nothing at all about Syracuse. A move is hard enough; a move to a place that us pretty much completely unfamiliar is quite scary. (And there’s the fact that my wife and I have always maintained that if and when we ever moved away from Buffalo we would head west, not farther east.) We spent the last two days there apartment hunting (we seem to have found one), and the town seems fairly nice. It’s got a Borders and a Barnes&Noble, so I won’t go completely crazy. I was dismayed to find that there is no Target there, but then I was relieved to find that the first Target in Syracuse will be opening sometime next month. (Which means they will be hiring….hmmmmm…..) I also find myself worrying that life in Syracuse won’t be as fulfilling as life in Buffalo; Syracuse is one-half Buffalo’s size, and I’m also afraid that the Great Lakes character that I love so much about Buffalo — hell, about the entire Great Lakes region, from Buffalo to Cleveland to Chicago to Wisconsin and, stretching the definition a bit, to the Twin Cities — will be absent. These fears will, I hope and expect, be laid to rest as I explore my new “home”. At the same time, though, I suspect that it will be a long time before I can refer to Syracuse as “home” without the quote-marks.

(If I have any readers from Syracuse, feel free to let me know what’s great about your city!)

(And because of the immediacy of the move, this will be the last post to Byzantium’s Shores for at least five days, and maybe as much as a week. If disaster strikes, it will be ten days before I’m writing here again — but I don’t expect it to be that long.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Test vehicle for NASA’s Project Orion.

Project Orion was a concept of a spacecraft that would be used for interstellar travel. The ship would achieve propulsion by detonating nuclear explosions against a collision plate at the bottom of the ship, kicking the ship along in a kind of nuclear “putt-putt” motion. According to Carl Sagan in Cosmos, development of Orion was set aside when the United States signed a treaty that forbade the detonation of nuclear weapons in space. “This seems to me a great pity,” Sagan writes. “The Orion starship is the best use of nuclear weapons I can think of.”

The test vehicle pictured here was actually flown in 1959 (using conventional charges, not nukes). It remains the only live test of an Orion vehicle to date. More on Project Orion can be found here.

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I have added a couple of new blogs to the “other journeys” section at left: one belonging to Dominion, called A Skeptical Blog (note the neat “shifty eyes” in his masthead), and Die Puny Humans, by comics writer (among other things) Warren Ellis. He’s got an entry on Batman that….well, see for yourself.

I’ve also added permalinks to Arts and Letters Daily, National Public Radio, and WBFO (Buffalo’s local NPR station).

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AICN has an article containing some reactions to a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away, including a conversation with the great filmmaker himself. An interesting error occurs in the transcription of the conversation (at least I assume it is an error). Miyazaki is quoted thusly:

“Fantasy is an absolutely essential element for children, as a temporary respite or escape or as a sucker and source of support. But if you go to completely into it and surrender to it, it can become a psychosis. It may sound hypocritical, since we sell videos: but I believe you should watch the films just once.”

I could be wrong, but I suspect that he said “succor”, not “sucker”.

I’m also interested that Miyazaki, one of cinema’s finest fantasists, evidently judges fantasy worthwhile almost entirely for its cathartic abilities. He doesn’t mention the possibilities that fantasy offers for exploring theme, which interests me because of the strong theme of family that seems present in much of his work.

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Now if this isn’t one of the freakiest bits of coincidence in history, I don’t know what is.

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It’s all Sean’s fault.

I wasn’t going to write this essay. I wasn’t going to post any personal reflections on 11 September. I was content to quote three particular items from works that are special to me: Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! my Captain!”, as a token of the enduring American culture; the picture and quote from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, as a reminder of the rank absurdity of the concerns that so often move humans to killing and war; and an epitaph from Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, the words of which would not, it seems to me, be out of place on the gravemarkers of any of the people who perished that day. On a day when every medium – television, radio, the Net – was saturated with personal remembrances, the offerings of one more blogger seemed redundant, even irrelevant. But, Sean asked an interesting question today:

“How should we remember?”

Everyone remembers in different ways. This is only natural, and necessary. A person who escaped the still-burning towers and lived will remember the day in a far different manner than someone who sent a loved one off to work, perhaps with a kiss or perhaps not, at the WTC or the Pentagon only to later find that their loved one had not gone off to work but off to die. A person who called in sick to work at the WTC that day will remember it differently from a person in rural Iowa who has never been east of the Mississippi or a person in Portland, Oregon who has never been east of the Rockies. How different are my memories of 11 September from everyone else’s, and how different are everyone else’s from mine? Sean’s question thus becomes not how we should remember, but how I should remember.

I had no personal connection to the events of that day. No one I know died or was injured; no one I know lost a family member; no one I know, so far as I am aware, even saw the attacks take place. There was not even a sense of fraternity in living in the same state as the WTC. Buffalo is a Great Lakes city, with more in common with Detroit than New York City. In fact, Buffalo is far enough away from NYC that one could drive from Buffalo to Cleveland and back in less time than it takes to drive from Buffalo to NYC, one way. I expect this is true of any large state; how much kinship does a person in El Paso feel with a person living in Texarkana? Thus, the horror that day was more for fellow Americans than for fellow New Yorkers. Not that this, in any way, lessened the horror. I suspect that day was precisely as horrifying for people who watched the attacks on TV in Honolulu as it was for the ones who watched them on TV in Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Des Moines. However, even as the day unfolded I could not help but think of the “six degrees of separation” that are said to exist between ourselves and anyone else in our world. It turned out that my closest personal connection to the attacks was through my father, a college professor of mathematics one of whose former students worked for Cantor-Fitzgerald.

After 11 September, I did not write for three days, nor did I listen to a single note of music. I think I read, but I don’t recall. Art was the farthest thing from my mind, until the events receded enough that my stories returned. (One of those stories, directly inspired by that awful day, can be read here.) Part of the problem was the fact that a good deal of what I write is horror, for what possible literary horror could ever approach the reality of 11 September? Of course, I soon remembered that fiction does not approach reality so much as enhance it; and besides, storytelling has been at the heart of all attempts to find something of value in the wake of horrible events. That is the ultimate basis of storytelling, horror and otherwise, going all the way back to the most primal myths. In any event, I struggled to find my own personal connection to the attacks, to close the sense of disconnect and find my reason to remember – – and my way of paying tribute, when eventually that time would come as today it finally did.

Like many, I wondered why these attacks. It surely was not a mere desire to wreak as much death as humanly possible; if body count had been their sole concern, surely the terrorists would have struck two days before, crashing their planes into sold-out NFL stadiums. No, these were attacks on our very culture. These people don’t just hate us. They hate our culture – – every culture, in truth, as was shown when the Taliban destroyed the great stone Buddhas.

And there it was. They wanted to destroy our culture, a culture which has produced Mark Twain and Steven Spielberg and Leonard Bernstein and Jackson Pollack and Charles Burchfield and Charlie Parker. They wanted to destroy a culture whose relics include Gravity’s Rainbow, Kind of Blue, Star Wars, Casablanca, East of Eden, Star Trek, Foundation, and Cosmos. They wanted to silence a culture that has spoken through such voices as Superman, Gully Foyle, Butch and Sundance, Professor Childermass, Tom Sawyer, Andy Dufresne, and the Joad family.

And with that realization came another: that while I had always loved America in an abstract sense, the way one always loves one’s hometown because it’s the first thing they knew, I had also loved America for its culture. America is my home. America is my country. And America is my culture. This country has produced so many, many works of art that have shaped me as a person and (I hope) as an artist. That is the personal connection I sought to 11 September: the attempt of a joyless, beautyless culture whose only notable feature is empty, ugly piety to destroy a culture that, while young, has contributed greatly to the march of human expression. So that is how I remember 11 September, and how I mark the day: by partaking of my culture.

I read some American poetry today. It was not a day for Tennyson, as much as I love his verse. I listened to American music today; it was not a day for Hector Berlioz. For dinner I made a pot of American chili, and for dessert, an ice cream cone. I didn’t discover America on 11 September; but because of 11 September, I rediscovered it.

And that is how I will remember the wicked day: not only for the fires and the deaths, but for everything that came before and everything that is certain to come after.

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O Captain! my Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

  But O heart! heart! heart!

    O the bleeding drops of red,

      Where on the deck my Captain lies,

        Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

  Here Captain! dear father!

    This arm beneath your head!

      It is some dream that on the deck,

        You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

    But I with mournful tread,

      Walk the deck my Captain lies,

        Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892).

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The planet Earth, as photographed by Voyager 1 as it left our Solar System. The shaft of light is a reflected sunbeam on the camera lens, and that pale blue dot is our world.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“….There is perhaps no better demonstration of the foly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

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Know, all those who see these lines,

That this man, by his appetite for honor,

By his steadfastedness,

By his love for his country,

By his courage,

Was one of the miracles of the god.

-Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

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